I was a boy when Kamukunji became a battleground between the restore-multiparty zealots and Baba Moi. And a boy, I filtered the political questions of the day through the lens of my parents' anxieties. It is thirty-five years since "the opposition" forced Moi to decree that Section 2A of the former constitution would be repealed and Kenya would be restored to multi-party politics.
The more things change, the more thee stay the same. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1849).
History is a funny thing. The longer you live, the more you forget, the more you must be reminded by those who are younger than you. The Seven Bearded Sisters initiated a sequence of political events that culminated in the restoration of multiparty democracy. They could not have predicted how wildly the pendulum would swing against the principles they held or, even more wildly, how many of the pro-democracy campaigners would betray those principles or how.
Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel Moi and Mwai Kibakli oversaw a security apparatus that murdered pro-democracy campaigners with impunity. Extra-judicial executions of Kenyans fighting for a more democratic political environment defines some of the darkest moments of the Kenya political project. In 2025, the political environment is redolent of the accusations of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. In many cases, the same faces feature. Where once they were bit players in a larger political narrative, today, they are star players.
What has not changed is that the pro-democracy campaigners are young, educated and highly motivated. They will not win, though, unless they learn the lessons of the 1990s and 2000s. They must eschew the narrative that revolutionary change ends with the toppling of an existing order. They must accept that the project they are engaged in is a multi-generational one, one that will require the highest level of dedication and sacrifice for the longest period and that it shall need to be handed off to successive generations who, even in the most optimistic scenarios, may not enjoy the fruits of.
One of the defining features of the 1990s was the fracturing of "the opposition" and the co-option by Moi's KANU of opposition stalwarts. Many "ate ugali" in State House. They never lived down the accusations of betrayal and died as pariahs. Many "crossed the floor" of the National Assembly and entered into "coalitions" with the ruling party. What they got in return was lucrative public tenders that were never closely scrutinised by the Controller and Auditor-General - or Parliament.
I was in India when the Congress government of Inder Kumar Gujral fell. I was still there when the BJP government of Atal Behari Vajpayee succumbed to the anti-Muslim Hindu supremacism of the RSS and Sangh Parivar culminating in the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom. The six years between the two events demonstrated to me the value of a coherent ideological consistency for a political party. The relatively swift destruction of the Congress's socialism between the election of Haradanahalli Doddegowda Deve Gowda and the resignation of IK Gujral was mirrored by the ascension of AB Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani. In the former, the party stopped believing in its own ideology; in the latter, the party solidified its ideology, purged the party of Doubting Thomases, and cemented its own rule for the next two decades, culminating inn the ascension of the Hindu purist, Narendra Modi.
Kenya's Gen Z, violently effective as they may be, do not have a coherent political ideology. They will never take political power so long as this remains true. They are a mirror to the ideological nakedness of the Second Liberation Movement: it was only invested in the restoration of multiparty democracy, and no more. Saba Saba 1990 forced Moi to recalibrate his politics; it did not establish an alternative political philosophy and therefore, it was easy to fracture the opposition.
We are in 2025. The names in the parliamentary Hansard are almost all new. The same narrative is being told, though. Laws that make no sense. Constitutional amendments that cement politicians' power but offer nothing for the electorate. "Activists" demanding "change" but whose members are only held together by vague promises of "full implementation of the constitution" and not much else. The Gen Z may have developed into a political force; but they have no political identity or ideology. (These contradictions befuddle me, I promise.) Thirty-five years after Saba Saba, the shedding of blood is the same; the lack of ideology is the same; will the political outcome be the same?